from a dispassionate third party perspective, suburbia is inherently more expensive and more dysfunctional than urbanity. yet the real estate industry has a lot of media/political/financial power, makes huge money from continually transforming greenfield land into autocentric suburbia (with many of its costs externalized), and wants to maintain its vested interests.

thus a lot of the supposed journalistic articles about development are really just veiled PR releases for the real estate industry. kotkin just happens to be a slick and somewhat articulate voice of his patrons.

Whoa how much time have you spent in Cambridge? Yes it is notorious (at least in the Boston area) for being a bastion of liberalism. But conformist? I don't know about that. You make some interesting points but what you wrote clearly displays your ignorance of Cambridge. The residents there are diverse in opinion and there are varying nuances within their overreaching liberal sentiments. I'm also willing to bet that if you were to bring this issue up with a Cambridgite they would be open to discussion instead of the dismay that I'm sure you'd get among your typical suburbanite in say Tewksbury or North Reading.

The final sentence of my previous quote was no doubt a bit hyperbolic, but I remain convinced that Cambridge is a fairly homogeneous place--certainly compared to Boston and most likely about the same level of diversity as Brookline. There's nothing wrong with having a city filled with anti-establishment leftists and it can be quite refreshing, as long as they don't use it as a platform for justifying smug comparisons against neighboring cities that are less that way. Smugness is never a "deserved" quality IMO, despite others' claims to the contrary. Maybe Cambridge had a diversity of opinion thirty years ago when it wasn't so blamed expensive, but these days people pay a premium to live there and, if they choose to live there and aren't poor students or public housing residents (and, let's face it, most of the students are not poor at all) they've decided to pay that price because they buy into the prevailing culture. Nothing wrong with that; it's human nature. But I'd bet the farm that if the population of Cambridge were asked, for example, to read the lead article by Joel Kotkin featured here, 90% of them would be in near complete agreement.

The final sentence of my previous quote was no doubt a bit hyperbolic, but I remain convinced that Cambridge is a fairly homogeneous place--certainly compared to Boston and most likely about the same level of diversity as Brookline. There's nothing wrong with having a city filled with anti-establishment leftists and it can be quite refreshing, as long as they don't use it as a platform for justifying smug comparisons against neighboring cities that are less that way. Smugness is never a "deserved" quality IMO, despite others' claims to the contrary. Maybe Cambridge had a diversity of opinion thirty years ago when it wasn't so blamed expensive, but these days people pay a premium to live there and, if they choose to live there and aren't poor students or public housing residents (and, let's face it, most of the students are not poor at all) they've decided to pay that price because they buy into the prevailing culture. Nothing wrong with that; it's human nature. But I'd bet the farm that if the population of Cambridge were asked, for example, to read the lead article by Joel Kotkin featured here, 90% of them would be in near complete agreement.

Somerville seems quite a bit more diverse to me.

Funny that you say that, you must have seen that I'm from there.

Yes by comparison Somerville is far more diverse than Cambridge in opinion. I suppose I fancy Cambridge because it was my escape from the repressive townie culture of Somerville. Either way growing up next to Cambridge I can tell you first hand they are smug bastards, but its not because they're all leftists.

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“Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.” - Spiro Kostof

There's nothing wrong with having a city filled with anti-establishment leftists

Ah, now I see why you're "convinced" and I'm not--you believe you've just given an accurate description of Cambridge. Did it ever occur to you that MIT and Harvard are actually part of the 'establishment,' and those glitzy riverfront office towers are not full of impoverished revolutionaries after all?

Quote:

But I'd bet the farm that if the population of Cambridge were asked, for example, to read the lead article by Joel Kotkin featured here, 90% of them would be in near complete agreement.

Is wild conjecture about supposed community agreement on someone obscure like Joel Kotkin a primary measure, right here and now, of a real-world community's true homogeneity? So much opinion, so little fact to base it on.

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Under construction right now in San Francisco: over 6,700 housing units and 5,400,000 square feet of commercial space.

Thanks for your response. My recollection is that the majority of my sentences began in the first person, so I was making no attempt to position my opinion as anything other than that. My experience after having lived in Cambridge is that it effectively shrouds its homogeneity of thought under layers of racial and cultural diversity. But I wasn't fooled.

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Originally Posted by fflint

Ah, now I see why you're "convinced" and I'm not--you believe you've just given an accurate description of Cambridge. Did it ever occur to you that MIT and Harvard are actually part of the 'establishment,' and those glitzy riverfront office towers are not full of impoverished revolutionaries after all?

Right on. Which makes the anti-establishment ethos that much more disingenuous. Sure, many of the staff at HarMIT might shop at the food co-ops, but far too many still consider themselves immune from the corrupting forces of large corporations or bureaucratic institutions, when the fact is they are hiding behind two of the largest employers in the state of Massachusetts. Cambridge is also filled with places that attract the bourgeois bohemians--corporate chains like Trader Joe's or Global Gifts or the quintessential Whole Foods. It's like a giant manifestation of that book/website "Stuff White People Like".

Quote:

Originally Posted by fflint

Is wild conjecture about supposed community agreement on someone obscure like Joel Kotkin a primary measure, right here and now, of a real-world community's true homogeneity? So much opinion, so little fact to base it on.

Empirical observations are often more powerful than fact. Anyone can pull various facts and assemble them into a context to create an argument; nonetheless, among the fundamentals of an argument is that it depends on a careful selection of the right facts, while excluding those that harm it. Kotkin is polarizing, no doubt--my suspicion remains that most people in Cambridge would not like his ideas, largely because he doesn't hold a great future for cities like Cambridge.

I've presented my opinion and we have agreed to disagree. Out of curiosity, do you have any places in mind where the reaction to a provocateur like Kotkin would yield widely disparate results, with a greater balance of "pro" and "con"?

Thanks for your response. My recollection is that the majority of my sentences began in the first person, so I was making no attempt to position my opinion as anything other than that. My experience after having lived in Cambridge is that it effectively shrouds its homogeneity of thought under layers of racial and cultural diversity. But I wasn't fooled.

Right on. Which makes the anti-establishment ethos that much more disingenuous. Sure, many of the staff at HarMIT might shop at the food co-ops, but far too many still consider themselves immune from the corrupting forces of large corporations or bureaucratic institutions, when the fact is they are hiding behind two of the largest employers in the state of Massachusetts. Cambridge is also filled with places that attract the bourgeois bohemians--corporate chains like Trader Joe's or Global Gifts or the quintessential Whole Foods. It's like a giant manifestation of that book/website "Stuff White People Like".

Empirical observations are often more powerful than fact. Anyone can pull various facts and assemble them into a context to create an argument; nonetheless, among the fundamentals of an argument is that it depends on a careful selection of the right facts, while excluding those that harm it. Kotkin is polarizing, no doubt--my suspicion remains that most people in Cambridge would not like his ideas, largely because he doesn't hold a great future for cities like Cambridge.

I've presented my opinion and we have agreed to disagree. Out of curiosity, do you have any places in mind where the reaction to a provocateur like Kotkin would yield widely disparate results, with a greater balance of "pro" and "con"?

Because your contentious and unsupported claims about our shared world are defended only by some dismissive assertion that opinion is more powerful than fact, I see only communication breakdown here.

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Under construction right now in San Francisco: over 6,700 housing units and 5,400,000 square feet of commercial space.

Thanks for your response. My recollection is that the majority of my sentences began in the first person, so I was making no attempt to position my opinion as anything other than that. My experience after having lived in Cambridge is that it effectively shrouds its homogeneity of thought under layers of racial and cultural diversity. But I wasn't fooled.

Right on. Which makes the anti-establishment ethos that much more disingenuous. Sure, many of the staff at HarMIT might shop at the food co-ops, but far too many still consider themselves immune from the corrupting forces of large corporations or bureaucratic institutions, when the fact is they are hiding behind two of the largest employers in the state of Massachusetts. Cambridge is also filled with places that attract the bourgeois bohemians--corporate chains like Trader Joe's or Global Gifts or the quintessential Whole Foods. It's like a giant manifestation of that book/website "Stuff White People Like".

Empirical observations are often more powerful than fact. Anyone can pull various facts and assemble them into a context to create an argument; nonetheless, among the fundamentals of an argument is that it depends on a careful selection of the right facts, while excluding those that harm it. Kotkin is polarizing, no doubt--my suspicion remains that most people in Cambridge would not like his ideas, largely because he doesn't hold a great future for cities like Cambridge.

I've presented my opinion and we have agreed to disagree. Out of curiosity, do you have any places in mind where the reaction to a provocateur like Kotkin would yield widely disparate results, with a greater balance of "pro" and "con"?

Go to places like Cambridgeport or East Cambridge or Fresh Pond. It seems like your assumptions are based on strolls through Harvard Square.

__________________
“Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.” - Spiro Kostof

"This is the city," ran the famous introduction to the popular crime drama Dragnet. "Los Angeles, Calif. I work here." Of course, unlike Det. Sgt. Joe Friday, who spoke those words every episode, I am not a cop, but Los Angeles has been my home for over 35 years. To Sgt. Friday, L.A. was a place full of opportunities to solve crimes, but for me Los Angeles has been an ideal barometer for the city of the future. For the better part of the last century, Los Angeles has been, as one architect once put it, "the original in the Xerox machine." It largely invented the blueprint of the modern American city: the car-oriented suburban way of life, the multi-polar metropolis around a largely unremarkable downtown, the sprawling jumble of ethnic and cultural enclaves of a Latin- and Asian-flavored mestizo society.

- Yet right now even the most passionate Angeleno struggles to feel optimistic. A once powerful business culture is sputtering. The recent announcement of Northrop Corp.'s departure to suburban Washington was just the latest blow to the region's aerospace industry, long our technological crown jewel. The area now has one-fourth as many Fortune 500 companies as Houston, and fewer than much-smaller Minneapolis or Charlotte, N.C.

- Other traditional linchpins are unraveling. The once thriving garment industry continues to shift jobs overseas and has lost much of its downtown base to real estate speculators. The port, perhaps the region's largest economic engine, has been mismanaged and now faces severe threats from competitors from the Pacific Northwest, Baja, Calif., and Houston. Although television and advertising shoots remain strong, the core motion picture shooting has been declining for years, with production being dispersed to such locations as Toronto, Louisiana, New Mexico, Michigan, New York and various locales overseas.

- It takes a kind of talent to sink this low given L.A.'s vast advantages: the best weather of any major global city, the largest port on this side of the Pacific, not to mention the glamour of Hollywood, the Lakers and one of the world's largest and most diverse populations of creative, entrepreneurial people.

- But the real power in L.A. today is not so much Villaraigosa but what the Los Angeles Weekly describes as a "labor-Latino political machine," whose influence extends all the way to Sacramento. These politicians represent, to a large extent, virtual extensions of the unions, particularly the public employees. The rise of the Latino-labor coalition does stir some pride among Hispanics, but it has proved an economic disaster for almost everyone who doesn't collect a government paycheck--L.A.'s city council is the nation's highest paid--or subsidy. Although perhaps not as outrageously corrupt as the Chicago machine, it is also not as effective. L.A.'s version manages to be both thuggish and incompetent.

Joel Kotkin....that always taints an article. He cherrypicks and misuses stats to make arguements.

For example, when he talks about how few Fortune 500 companies the LA area has, is he counting Orange county? The casual reader might assume so, but I bet he isn't. (Even if he is, my accusations still stand in general!)

from a dispassionate third party perspective, suburbia is inherently more expensive and more dysfunctional than urbanity. yet the real estate industry has a lot of media/political/financial power, makes huge money from continually transforming greenfield land into autocentric suburbia (with many of its costs externalized), and wants to maintain its vested interests.

thus a lot of the supposed journalistic articles about development are really just veiled PR releases for the real estate industry. kotkin just happens to be a slick and somewhat articulate voice of his patrons.

Tehcnically, the real estate industry would be just fine with a more urban future. It's really the oil-car industry that has beef.

Suburbanism in the US, to me, is almost more a cultural and social phenominom that something that can objectivley be seen as a brick and mortar issue. Many posters have made very rational and logistical arguments regarding why urban areas thrive over suburban and yet the exasperation continues.

American suburbia, IMHO, is simply people acting on their inner desires a) To be "King of One's Castle and b) To have a builtform that specifically isolates oneself from others in society, which is attractive to those with intolerance issues.

This industry has different organizations and different political viewpoints depending on what segment of the industry you're in, and because companies choose which organizations to support. The sprawl-focus suburbia industry has a mighty political machine in many regions, including mine, where the BIAW is a force for evil.

I often disagree with Kotkin, however he is one of the few geographers who writes honestly about money and class. He's concerned about working class people being about to live comfortable lives. He doesn't extol the suburbs per se, but places where you can buy a family home for $150,000 (many of which are sunbelt suburbs).

I'm an elitist. I love cities. I live in Manhattan and can't imagine living anywhere else. Then again, most people can't afford a $350,000 studio (and that's a cheap studio).

The challenge to urban planners is not simply transportation design or being carbon neutral, but also cost. Until we can offer working class families an affordable alternative, can we criticize them for wanting to live in Las Vegas and Phoenix?

Also, I don't think the subsidized housing is the answer. It's too complicated to administer and creates similarly entrenched vested interests: people who were there first, or people who are good at filling out paperwork and getting their names on waiting lists, etc.

I would respect him more if he wrote about how to bring costs down in New York and San Francisco, then again, we already know how to that. We have to take on the affluent vested interests that want to keep the working classes out.

I have always challenged the notion that suburbs are cheaper than the city. Most of the time when people like Kotkin make their arguments they take extreme examples like the cost of housing in Manhattan versus exurban Texas. In Chicago the cost of housing per square foot is higher in the city than in the suburbs but the suburbs have a higher cost of living when it comes to transportation (dominated by the automobile), property taxes are higher, utility costs are usually higher, not to mention property maintence costs are higher due to the average property size being larger.

Honestly if anything its the suburbs that are elitest, most of the suburbs cater to a homogeneous upper middle class with the same values and spending habits. I mean to me a place like Naperville is much more elitest than the city of Chicago. Most new exurban developments in Chicagoland cater to the top 50% of the income spectrum only, sure the rich usually dont clamer to fresh mass produced sprawl but the poor and also lower middle class are also shut out of most of suburbia. The city of Chicago has neighborhoods that cater to everything from the dirt poor to the super rich.

I often disagree with Kotkin, however he is one of the few geographers who writes honestly about money and class. He's concerned about working class people being about to live comfortable lives. He doesn't extol the suburbs per se, but places where you can buy a family home for $150,000 (many of which are sunbelt suburbs).

I'm an elitist. I love cities. I live in Manhattan and can't imagine living anywhere else. Then again, most people can't afford a $350,000 studio (and that's a cheap studio).

The challenge to urban planners is not simply transportation design or being carbon neutral, but also cost. Until we can offer working class families an affordable alternative, can we criticize them for wanting to live in Las Vegas and Phoenix?

Also, I don't think the subsidized housing is the answer. It's too complicated to administer and creates similarly entrenched vested interests: people who were there first, or people who are good at filling out paperwork and getting their names on waiting lists, etc.

I would respect him more if he wrote about how to bring costs down in New York and San Francisco, then again, we already know how to that. We have to take on the affluent vested interests that want to keep the working classes out.

Thank you for speaking honestly about the important insights Kotkin has to offer. You've already suggested yourself less of an elitist just by acknowledging that some of what Kotkin says has merit, love him or hate him. I might add that in many places, it's not just the working classes who seek comfortable lives in the affordable exurbs--in the costliest cities, the middle class is almost as severely priced out.

Both the city and the suburbs clearly offer milieus that can foster a certain degree of elitist attitudes. Can the urban snob from Old Town or the Gold Coast in Chicago really claim any moral high ground over the country club elitist in Winnetka or Kenilworth? Much of it really boils down to personal taste.

Tehcnically, the real estate industry would be just fine with a more urban future. It's really the oil-car industry that has beef.

Suburbanism in the US, to me, is almost more a cultural and social phenominom that something that can objectivley be seen as a brick and mortar issue. Many posters have made very rational and logistical arguments regarding why urban areas thrive over suburban and yet the exasperation continues.

American suburbia, IMHO, is simply people acting on their inner desires a) To be "King of One's Castle and b) To have a builtform that specifically isolates oneself from others in society, which is attractive to those with intolerance issues.

while the oil industry does wield political power, its power is generally at higher levels of government. your various mayors and aldermen usually aren't receiving campaign contributions from oilmen.

zoning is the general preserve of the municipal entities. research your local municipal politicians. pay attention to those who lobby and give donations to the various municipal politicians. you'll see that on a municipal level, it's the development industry that has the most to gain from "market liberalization" which generally includes securing greenfield development. greenfield development is by far the most profitable endeavor for the real estate industry. thus any attempts to enact comprehensive growth boundaries are fought to the death. you could point out the developers who salivate at the prospect of brownfield development, but these are niche players, as brownfield is inherently less lucrative than turning the urban boundaries into new subdivisions.

The funny thing is that the development industry is fractured on growth management. The sprawl people want cheap greenfield sites and subsidized infrastructure. The owners of existing commercial property often want growth management....because reducing the ability to sprawl helps maintain/grow values for existing properties.

In fact, many commercial real estate buyers focus specifically on properties in markets with "high barriers to entry." They're willing to pay more in land-restricted cities because values have more potential to go up vs. go down.

you mean the real estate investors and speculators want high barriers to entry. of course, this generally only occurs in the largest and most sclerotic of cities (e.g. los angeles and new york) whose existing footprints are effectively too geographically large for their new greenfield burbs to be tolerable.

the mainstream builders, e.g. toll bros, KB, d.r. horton, etc. have the cash and want an ever-increasing amount of greenfield land. the various owners of urban periphery land want to turn it into subdivisions.

both parties want to elevate their own selfish goals, often at the expense of the greater good. having the nimby/speculator inspired housing shortages only works to hurt the younger residents.

it sucks that people take jane jacobs out of context, and equate all urban planners with the idiot likes of robert moses. thus we'll protest any attempts at urban planning, only to accept the development industry's goals. thus you'll get continued sprawl and the occasional historically themed leisure center billed as urbanism. yet density and public transit aren't on the radar.

it's a moot point though. at least on this continent, we know which faction eventually wins out. thus you'll continue to see even more sprawl. yet most people will just blame it on bad government or a freedom loving culture, yet fail to identify the financial beneficiaries of sprawl.

Yes, developers have strong economic incentives to build on greenfield sites, but the NIMBY lobby frequently prevents them from developing brownfield sites. Kotkin is not Wendell Cox. He's a born New Yorker. He likes cities and understands why people want to live there (unlike Cox). His point, as I understand it, is that it doesn't matter how livable a city is if the average person can't afford to live there.

You can't fight sprawl without simultaneously increasing density. The problem with urban liberals, particularly in cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco, is that they rail against one while protesting the other. They also like to protest "new" gentrification, forgetting that they were the prime beneficiaries of "old" gentrification.

I have a friend whose parents bought her a condo in the East Village 20 years ago. Now she's upset about what's happening to Williamsburg. Is that morally (or logically) any different than the teabaggers who hate government, except for Social Security and Medicare?